By Marina Malenic
Responding to the Army’s call for cheaper precision artillery rounds, Raytheon [RTN] says it is significantly redesigning its Excalibur 155mm GPS- guided munition for the competition the service is holding for the next-increment contract.
“One thing we’ve managed to do in the 1-b competition [for the next phase of Excalibur] is to reduce the parts count in the round by greater than 50 percent,” David Brockaway, Raytheon’s business development manager for the munition, told Defense Daily in a telephone interview yesterday.
Brockaway called shrinking the number of small components in the shell the “top-level measure of goodness in terms of reduced price” because the simplification leads to lower labor costs in manufacture, assembly and inspection.
“All that together gets you two things: a much better price and inherent reliability advantages,” he added.
Raytheon is competing with ATK [ATK] for the contract to produce the next increment of Excalibur. Each company received a development contract worth approximately $10 million a year ago.
The competition will conclude with a shoot-off in March, according to the Army acquisition strategy.
A major component of that strategy is significant cost reduction. Initial deliveries of Excalibur cost the Army some $75,000 per round when development costs are taken into account.
Senior leaders have been clamoring for cheaper rounds to more readily meet the high demand for the munition in theater (Defense Daily, Oct. 7).
Brockaway said that Raytheon’s offering “will exceed [the Army’s] savings requirement.”
Meanwhile, the company is continuing to use Atlantic Inertial Systems as the supplier for the inertial measurement unit (IMU) in the Excalibur 1-a rounds it is currently delivering to the Army.
Over the summer, the Army temporarily suspended shipping the shells to theater when a Honeywell [HON]-supplied IMU displayed “anomalous behavior” during a firing test, according to the Excalibur program office at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J. The IMU is a balancing mechanism essential to the projectile’s accuracy.
Raytheon announced the change in parts suppliers in August and says that, since then, Excalibur has achieved 100 percent reliability in testing (Defense Daily, Aug. 5).
“With something as complex as this, you always have to have alternate sources,” Brockaway said regarding the precision component. “Honeywell provides a lot of good products to a lot of weapons systems, and when they’re ready to provide a better product at a better price we’ll be ready to work with them again.”
Raytheon has replaced IMUs on 1,075 shells, according to the Army program office. The retrofitted rounds began shipping to Afghanistan last month.